Archive

Just for backup reason a summary of my Twitter messages. It is always a nice way to reexperience the developments of a certain time period. For this reason my most important Twitter messages from April 2015 until May 2015. Read more...

A couple of months ago, I tinkered around with NodeJS on my local machine. After a while I got kinda addicted to the NodeJS Plattform for webservice (SOA) applications as well as Desktop Apps (Electron/NodeWebkit). Hence more complicated NodeJS experiments will start, I decided to set-up my own webserver environment for my (local) network with a Raspberry Pi 2 B. My tools of choice are:

Some time passed since this Adobe public relation dilemma about Flex and Flash happened. Honestly, it hit me very hard. Exactly at this time, I was diving deeper into the Flex 4 Component Framework and tried to adapt my new knowledge to Flex Mobile. After some failures and misunderstandings I was on a good way and I was convinced that the (new) Flex 4 Framework is a real step forward for developing User Interface. For this reason, I got a little bit mad about the whole discussion of HTML5 vs. Flex. I expected that HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript will come, but not so fast and powerful. However, I got a good opportunity and checked what it is all about this new hype of web technologies. As a Flex and Flash Develeoper the transition to this open standard development approach is not very difficult, except the tooling is like from another planet. I had the feeling that finding the right tooling is as difficult as finding the appropriate life partner. There doesn't exist an one simple solution for everything like Flash Builder environment. In my case I recommend for writing Code to use the IDE Webstorm, for debugging I am using Firebug for Firefox. Whatever everyone has his own preferences, so decide for yourself what is the best.

Now I am almost studying Interactive Art for one year. Me, as a Flash and Flex Developer, like coding with audio-visual and interaction-based content. But if I am honest, in the last time I did not use Flash in my projects at all. I had to deal with some other powerful creative coding tools. Some of these tools provide me, as an artist, much more freedom than the Flash plattform can ever provide. For example, creating a visual output for multi-displays applications, programming on hardware (arduino), some real-time video tracking (face detection) experiments, using special Open-GL Renderer for 3D graphics and so on. But I also ran into problems, which I would never have with using Flash. Especially, when I worked together with unexperienced programmer. For this reason, I will describe some of these creative coding tools with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. After this article you should have a good overview about the available tools in creative coding.

In the last months I worked with people from abroad or with big physical distances. The first time I thought, yeah that is not a problem. Everybody has got an internet connection and that is all what we need. In my old company the Liip AG - who I worked for - their whole project management and file management systems were almost accessible over an internet connection. For this reason I could work from everywhere I want. I thought, that would not change in my future time, because the internet has solutions for everything. Yeah, I have to say that is true. But it was not easy to find the right tools and services for exchanging ideas, files, time schedules and other stuff for free. My projects are not so big that it makes sense to implement this infrastructures by my own. I found some free or at least some cheap services which you can use for working together with friends or other small projects.

Idea Development and Sharing

Creating and developing ideas with people, who are not physical available, is not very easy. Maintaining and extending are also two not very minor problems. In the last time I found a very good workflow for me and my friends. We do a telephone conference via skype and in the same time we use the service Mindmeister (Online Mindmapping Tool) and the tool Balsamiq MockUp. At the moment our solution works good and it is totally free with some limitations. A more professional solution for idea development and exchange may be the Service ProtoShare. Unfortunately, there is no real free pricing model available, therefore I never tested this service. Read more...

Please be pleasant with my English. I am not a native English speaker and the English language is one of my personal weaknesses. To improve my English skills, I am planning to write some blog posts in English. So if I wrote any bullshit in these blog posts, please correct me!

Disclaimer End:

At my work at Liip I had to work quite a lot with the Flex Chart API. At some point I was very disappointed about the lack of deeper documentations or advanced flex charts examples. In my mind the whole dashboard flex chart examples are not really helpful, because the examples are not very good real-life examples. But after a few months ago I found some very nice examples for the Flex Chart Advanced stuff and now I would like to give you a short guidance, how you can handle the complex and powerful Flex Chart API.

First Step - Check your Skills

Make sure that you understand the Flex Component Life Cycle and the rendering procedure behind the Flex Framework. The whole Chart Topic is very complex in handling data and handling a good rendering procedure. So that is the reason why it is very important that you understand the basics of the Flex Framework. If you have got some problems to understand the concepts behind the Flex Framework, no problem, I highly recommend the Adobe Max presentation Diving Deep with the Flex Component Lifecycle from Deepa Subramaniam. Otherwise have a look on my SFUG Presentation “Moving from AS3 to Flex”

Second Step – Set up your documentation for the Flex Chart Basic Stuff:

Yeah, the Flex Chart API is very huge. So you have to work a lot with the documentation. Fortunately, the basic Flex Chart stuff is documented very well. If you want to do some minor changes on your chart, please have a look on the Flex Data Visualization documentation (Livedocs) and on the Language Reference. Sometimes you would not get a solution from this documentation, than have a look on the Flex Chart examples at flexexamples.com. Mostly I use the tags-Content overview and press the Buttons “CTRL+F” in Mozilla Firefox for the string search. After that I typed in “LineChart” for Line Chart examples or “Charting” for Flex charts in general. So I am quite fast and I always find the right code snippets. This procedure fits for the basic chart stuff very well.

Third Step – Things are becoming complicated

Oh no, our client wants to have some special item renderings and user interaction on the charts… At this point the Flex Chart could become a nightmare. Why?!

Because of the Flex Charts API Architecture is very complex. A lot of classes are related to each other and so on